SpaceX plans to land on Mars using the most powerful rocket in the world
Aerospace company takes to Twitter saying it's planning the landing in as soon as two years' time
On Wednesday, Elon Musk's private company SpaceX announced on Twitter that it plans to send a spacecraft to Mars as soon as 2018.
The mission will involve sending a spacecraft called the Red Dragon to Mars to retrieve samples collected by NASA's Mars rover and then return them to Earth.
Here's SpaceX's announcement:
SpaceX has had big plans to usher in a new era of reusable rockets that could send the first humans to Mars and return them home for a while. In 2011, SpaceX released a video showing how they were going to re-land a rocket booster after launching it to space — something that had never been done before.
On December 21, 2015, SpaceX successfully landed its first reusable rocket, a Falcon 9, on a launch pad. They followed that up on April 8, 2016 by successfully landing another Falcon 9 on a barge floating in the ocean. Musk has announced plans to relaunch this Falcon 9 as early as May.
The Red Dragon will be launched into space with the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is kind of like the Falcon 9 on steroids. SpaceX has announced plans to launch the rocket into space as soon as November 2016.
SpaceX has boasted that the Falcon Heavy is the world's most powerful rocket, capable of carrying twice the payload of the Space Shuttle. Only the Saturn V, the rocket used to launch astronauts to the moon in the Apollo program, was capable of delivering more payload to orbit.